I'm looking to create a "web story" to support my business. In a nutshell, what I am trying to do is to create my own property within the fanspace of a certain anime franchise (okay, Mobile Suit Gundam, if you must know). It's intended to be published to on my business website. The idea is that the story serves as a showcase for my pretty mecha designs. There will also be various other illustrations as well, either character designs or cel-shaded style scenes. The whole thing is intended to draw people to my site, where they will hopefully buy official merchandise (not of my story, but from the actual anime). However - in order to do that, the story has to be compelling as well. Just pretty pictures of robots won't do it, even though that's what I want people to buy. The problem is - I have no idea what the right format should be. I don't think a traditional story format is going to work, with a narrative and dialogue etc. Then again, a narrative alone is just a bunch of telling that reads like a Wikipedia entry. It's not going to inspire people to come back and be excited for the next chapter. So I'm a little stumped and looking for some ideas on how to execute this. Any suggestions are gratefully received.
Maybe a blog like 'The Martian' started? You could post installments and people would hopefully come back to read them; and each time they'd be exposed to your merchandise.
That's sort of the plan, but what I'm stuck on is how to tell the story. I'm not sure if a traditional story format works, but a movie script style story doesn't seem compelling either.
I'd consider a traditional/script amalgamation, such that narrative is written in a traditional story format while dialogue written like a script. I think the main concern is slimming down the content as much as possible, even if it is just in appearance... script-like dialogue would cut/minimize dialogue tags. Homestuck did something similar, except they used chat-logs instead of script dialogue. It's massive in terms of content, but the content is divided between plenty of illustrations so it was easy to keep clicking "next"... just one more paragraph. Here's a place in Homestuck that goes on to show the different formats in which they deliver the story: https://www.homestuck.com/story/1086
